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Topic: Anatomy of a skin (Read 9863 times)

As there aren't many FOUC custom textures available, as well as the texturing tutorials are also missing, I will try to summarize here what I was able to figure out about it, hoping that you guys might be able to start working with it and revealing infos that I couldn't, or maybe some help from the authors themselves would also be more than welcome!

So here is a documentation which is not complete yet, but I have the aim to update it reguraliry.

2. Unpack the textures- start BFS3pack_smart_gui.exe and simply drag and drop X:\...\Flatout Ultimate Carnage\data.bfs into it- set a loaction for unpacking the whole content of the archive, which is preferably different than the install folder (although it is possible to run the game unpacked, which would support modding, it would slow down the game according to common knowledge and depending on systems)

3. Find the car to edit- the unpacked structure will contain them at this location: X:\...\data\cars\car_00- here is the list which folder contains which cars textures:

- the folders also contain files belong to the carmodel itself, and all 5 skins share them (i.e. modifying them will affect the appearance of all every skin of that particular car, which might not be wanted), these are (plus their normal and damaged versions):

grille.ddsinterior.ddslights.ddsrim.ddstire.ddswindows.dds

- the folders do contain a couple of .ini files as well, these are different properties and definitions of the car, easily editable with notepad, however, this will not be discussed in this tutorial

5. Edit the textures

5.1 skin0.dds- background layer: the livery itself, this is what you paint, without shadows or lights, only plain colors and motives are expected- alpha channel: strength of reflection (black: dull, white: glossy)

things to notice (see attachment):- the Chili looks quite rusty, and its surface doesn't reflect too much of the environment, caused by a rather dark alpha channel, meanwhile the Chili Pepper has a polished surface, reflecting the environment pretty much, caused by a relatively light alpha channel (can be observed around above the front left wheel)- except for the average gray representing a painted surface of an old car, we can see areas that make much reflection (weather worn edges, newly installed metallic parts), and areas that don't (inner frame of the windows which are much likely made of rubber)- notice how the raw blueish liveries of the cars look distortedley yellowish in-game! if a car in this "showroom" does not really represent the color scheme you desire, watch it in action, on track, it will be closer. however, there is a tendency, that you have to make your skin darker than you initially wanted to depending on the results.- the surface of the Chili is quite diverse, meanwhile the Chili Peppers' is absolutley homogenious, due to technology its painting is achieved and thanks to the fact that is not weather-worn. however, this will give us hard times finding the edges of specific car parts on the skin.

- shaders: there are at least two kind of shaders that could be applied to a cars skin-slot. if you replace a texture in a specific skinslot, the shader would be applied to your new skin.

6. Pack the textures- first save the modified textures, preferably with the settings of the original .dds file (i.e.: DXT3 ARGB 8bpp explicit alpha, 2d Texture, Generate MIP maps)- for packing the textures, the unpacked files must reflect the same structure as they were packed in data.bfs. it is advised to separate a new data folder anywhere on the hard drive, and have only the edited textures in it, this will save time during the pack procedure (i.e. data\cars\car_00\*.dds)- start BFS3pack_smart_gui.exe and simply drag and drop this new data folder into it, and save it

7. Making the textures appear in-game- rename your freshly created data.bfs to for example mod.bfs and paste it into the install folder of the game (there is already a data.bfs in it which we obviously don't want to overwrite), so it will be in the same folder as data.bfs- start notepad and open filesystem (X:\...\Flatout Ultimate Carnage\filesystem), and type the name of your just pasted .bfs archive to a new row, after the last row, to make the file look like this, and save it without and extension (instead of the default save option of notepad, which would create a filesystem.txt, we need a filesystem)

data.bfsstreamed.bfsmod.bfs

(if there are additional lines listed under the 2 default .bfs files, the game will attempt to read data from them first. if there is a different skin for a specific car in mod.bfs, that skin will appear in-game. those files that are not included in mod.bfs will be read from data.bfs.)

I'm having the issue, that the extracted files aren't visible when I'm actually in the folder, but when I try to unpack again it shows that the files are there in their separate folders. I just can't go to them. I unpacked them to /Flatout Ultimate Carnage/packer/extractedAnd supposedly it created a folder "data" within are the new folders.

And when I'm trying to edit the location string to /Flatout Ultimate Carnage/packer/extracted/data, I get a Windows error that no such location even exists, as it clearly does.

bfs2 is for Flatout 2, bfs3 is for Ultimate Carnage, BFS3pack_smart_gui.exe is the application you might want to use. other tools (including bfs2) might not be able to extract files properly form an FOUC archive, and that might have been your problem.

Extract the .rar open the folder and start BFS3pack_smart_gui.exe.Right click the icon and select FlatOut Ultimate Carnage.Drag and drop your file to the icon, to compress a data file to a .bfs file or to uncompress a .bfs file to a data file for editing.